How To Ride The Social Media Wave [Examples]

5 Ways To Extend Content Marketing’s Social Media Reach

When it comes to social media, marketers are a lot like surfers riding a strong wave. The social media ecosystem can be a huge wave of information that’s difficult to break through and get noticed.

To maximize your content marketing’s reach, you must ensure that every piece of content facilitates multiple opportunities to be shared and distributed.

Stephen Covey’s adage “start with the end in mind” is useful when planning your content marketing and distribution across social media. Maximizing the impact of your content marketing requires creating a plan for each major piece of content.

Here are five strategies to enhance your reach by riding the social media wave.

Ask a question to extend the social media conversation. Don’t assume that your audience will just jump in and comment. Help them crystallize their thinking by adding a query in the form of a specific question at the end of your blog post, in your tweets or in your Facebook interactions. To gather targeted information, use Q&A sites like LinkedIn and Quora. Here’s the question at the end of one of my blog posts.Actionable Marketing Tip: If you’ve asked a question, especially to a targeted audience, respond to comments. This is especially important for bloggers and guest bloggers.

Chop longer content pieces into easy-to-digest tidbits. Specifically, add “Tweet this” buttons to different points, facts or quotes in a longer article. Part of the objective is to offer a variety of different options for sharing and to streamline the process for readers. Actionable Marketing Tip: Extend content distribution by tweeting a different fact or quote over time. The benefit is sharing different information with followers without continually sharing the same link. Bear in mind that followers may not see all of your tweets depending on when and how they track you. (BTW, here’s a tool to help with your tweets.)

Use images participants find shareworthy. Think beyond a small attention catching photo in your blog post or article. Create a more significant image viewers will want to share on a variety of platforms. Think photographs, images and infographics. Here’s an example from one of my articles:

Incorporate Twitter bait into live presentations and webinars. Since attendees tweet and blog during conferences and presentations, offer interesting, pithy statements for their streams to attract attention. Actionable Marketing Tip: Help attendees by putting the Twitter bait in your presentation with relevant hashtags and Twitter handles. Additionally, get someone to schedule these tweets on behalf of the program.

Invite others to join you on social media. This is easiest to accomplish on owned social media such as a blog. Among the major options are to ask for guest blog posts (Here’s link to my guest post on Social Media Examiner), collect short answers in a roundup post, allow experts to curate content, or interview experts. Actionable Marketing Tip: Ask contributors to promote the piece after thanking them and sending them the content’s link after it’s published. Also, include their Twitter handles when you share the content yourself.

To maximize your reach, integrate the ability to socialize your content before you publish it. This requires planning ways to extend your content social sharing.

What other ways would you recommend to help ride the social media wave and extend the reach of your content?